Once thought of as a fleeting and exotic physical phenomena, multiple-state existence, otherwise known as quantum coherence, has been observed in living plant tissue at room temperature.

Efficiently turning light into plant energy, photosynthesis is a quantum process that takes full advantage of the weird physics at atomic scales. Wired:

'The analogy I like is if you have three ways of driving home through rush hour traffic. On any given day, you take only one. You don’t know if the other routes would be quicker or slower. But in quantum mechanics, you can take all three of these routes simultaneously. You don’t specify where you are until you arrive, so you always choose the quickest route,' said Greg Scholes, a University of Toronto biophysicist.

Scholes’ findings, published Wednesday in Nature, are the strongest evidence yet for coherence — the technical name for multiple-state existence — in photosynthesis.